About Barbara Rehermann, MD

Barbara Rehermann, MD

Senior Investigator, National Institute of Health.

Dr. Barbara Rehermann is Chief of the Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch, NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She received an M.D. degree and the Venia Legendi for Immunology from Medizinische Hochschule, Hannover, Germany.  She pursued postgraduate clinical training in the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology under Professor Dr. Michael Manns at Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, and a research fellowship under Professor Francis Chisari in the Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA.

The goals of her research are (i) to better understand the immunological factors that contribute to inflammatory diseases, in particular viral hepatitis, (ii) to assess how immune responses and chronic inflammation are regulated by the microbiome and (iii) to devise strategies that modulate the progression of chronic liver disease and/or induce protective immune responses. Her laboratory performs translational immunology studies with biospecimens from well-characterized patient cohorts and uses animal models such as laboratory mice with wild mouse microbiota to evaluate how hepatic and systemic immune responses are regulated by the gastrointestinal microbiome.

Dr. Rehermann is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the Association of American Physician (AAP) and the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Sciences), a Fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), and a member of the American Association of Immunologists , the American Society for Microbiology and a member of the American Association of Immunologists, the American Society for Microbiology and the German Societies for Immunology and Virology. She has trained more than 60 postdoctoral fellows and students from the US, Europe and Asia, many of whom now hold academic positions.